A panel of researchers from the RIKEN Research Centre for Allergy and Immunology in Japan has discovered a new form of stem cells eating cancer. The team says that the T-cells have the potential to be injected so as to attack cancer cells.

The University of Tokyo researchers have published their latest study in the U. S. science journal Cell Stem Cell on January 4. They have elucidated how they have reached to the new form of cancer specific cells.

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) were reprogrammed by them. These cells, as per the findings, were already amid the process of development so they could assault skin cancer. Reprogramming these into iPS cells, the iPS cells were returned into T cells in patients with malignant melanoma.

It was found that almost 98% of the resulting cells then detected antigens of cancer cells. Also, T cells remained in a healthy newborn state. This is unlike the conventional immune therapy, in which, the number of T cells with the ability to identify cancerous and infected cells rises outside the patient's body and then are returned to it.

"This strategy may solve the problem which the current immunotherapy strategies are facing, and thus would make a major breakthrough in cancer therapy”, sources quoted lead researcher Dr. Hiroshi Kawamoto as exclaiming.